Identifying Fathers Called Crucial to Welfare Reform

WASHINGTON — Opening a major new front in efforts to discourage out-of-wedlock births and increase collection of child support, the Administration’s welfare reform task force will urge that states be required to identify the fathers of virtually all children born outside of marriage.

The group, on the verge of completing recommendations to present to President Clinton, has decided to make stringent new federal standards on establishing paternity a centerpiece of the task force’s proposals for implementing Clinton’s campaign promise to crack down on “deadbeat dads” who fail to pay child support.

It also symbolizes the task force’s call for a fundamental shift in welfare laws to require that fathers of children on public relief face the same obligations as mothers. As part of that shift, the task force calls for “significant experimentation” with “mandatory work programs” for men who do not pay child support--a recommendation that mirrors its proposal that mothers be required to work after two years on the rolls.

“Ultimately, expectations of mothers and fathers should be parallel,” the task force wrote in an internal draft report. “Whatever is expected of the mother should be expected of the father.”

Like many outside welfare experts, the task force maintains that increasing child support collection is crucial to reducing the number of children in poverty. While absent parents have the potential to pay more than $47 billion annually in child support, only $13 billion is now being paid, according to an analysis cited in the report. Only about a quarter of women eligible for child support receive the full amount they are owed, federal census figures show.

“If we cannot solve the problem of child support, we cannot possibly adequately provide for our children,” the report declares.

Failure to establish paternity has long been considered the Achilles’ heel of government efforts to collect more child support from absent fathers--particularly those of children on welfare. In 1990, the latest year for which figures are available, paternity was established for just 34% of the nearly 1.2 million out-of-wedlock children.

Despite intensified state and federal focus on the problem, that represents only a modest increase from 1978, when paternity was established for 20% of such children. The rate of paternity establishment has not even increased as fast as the number of illegitimate births, which doubled over the same period. This means, in absolute terms, that the number of children for whom paternity has not been established is substantially larger now than it was 15 years ago.

Under current law, states are required to establish paternity only for children of mothers who apply for welfare or request state assistance in collecting overdue child support. Typically, those applications are not made for months or even years after the child is born--a delay that greatly complicates the task of establishing paternity.

Under the task force’s proposal, states would be required instead to attempt to establish paternity for all children born out of wedlock, preferably immediately after birth while the mothers are still in the hospital. Some steps in that direction already have been taken.

In the budget law passed last summer, the Administration pushed through a provision requiring states to establish voluntary programs in hospitals in which unmarried mothers would be asked to name the fathers of their children and the fathers would be asked to acknowledge their paternity.

As part of the plan, the task force proposes setting “performance standards” that would require states to establish paternity in an increasing percentage of cases each year and provide both financial incentives and penalties to spur compliance.

Paternity establishment “needs to be a non-negotiable expectation,” said Bruce Reed, deputy director of domestic policy in the White House and co-chairman of the task force. “It shouldn’t be up to the mother to decide whether she is going to cooperate. Then she’s subject to intimidation by the putative father. If . . . everyone is expected to establish paternity right from the start, most of the problems in the child support system would go away.”

Wayne D. Doss, president of the National Child Support Enforcement Assn., said that most professionals in the field would welcome the task force’s call for a major initiative on establishing paternity. “The Administration is pointing toward an ethic where it says it is the right of every child to have paternity established,” said Doss, the director of the Los Angeles County Bureau of Family Support Operations.

But Doss cautioned that such a dramatic expansion of state efforts to establish paternity will not be without cost. “It does present a lot of resource issues,” he said. “It would be a fairly expensive process.”

The task force report does not put a price tag on the new initiative, nor explain how it would be funded. But it says that the overall welfare reform effort--which officials have indicated might cost as much as $6 billion annually when fully phased in--would be funded by offsetting budget cuts.

Roberta Ikemi, a staff attorney at the California Women’s Law Center who works with welfare recipients in Los Angeles, raised another red flag. While it is “a good idea to have parents take responsibility for their children,” she said, establishing paternity in more cases also may force more women into an ongoing relationship with fathers who are abusive or violent. “It can be dangerous for some women,” she said.

The reluctance of welfare recipients to cooperate in paternity cases is already “a major problem” for child support collection efforts, Doss said. But, he added, welfare offices rarely impose sanctions allowed under existing law.

In their draft report, the task force calls for “clearer, stricter cooperation requirements on mothers” to help identify the father of their child. One senior official said the group may recommend that women who do not cooperate would face reductions in their welfare benefits as well as in other means-tested government aid, such as housing subsidies.

As a carrot to that stick, the group is considering providing an additional $50 a month to welfare recipients once paternity is established. Currently, mothers on welfare can receive an additional $50 a month only after a father begins paying at least that much in child support. The state keeps the remainder of child support payments made by the father of a child on welfare. Nationally, more than $2.2 billion was collected from such fathers in 1992.

The task force also identifies an array of measures intended to increase payment of child support once paternity is established--most importantly the creation of a national database that would track the hiring of new employees at any business in the country. That would be aimed at helping states track down absent fathers, particularly across state lines.

It also suggests testing a program under which government would guarantee child support payments to all children in single-parent families, though one senior official cautioned Wednesday that such demonstrations would be “limited” and at “the very margins of what we’re talking about.”

In response to the argument that many absent fathers--especially young parents--lack the resources to pay child support, the task force will recommend qualifying them for the same training programs that are offered to women on welfare.